With the increased number of internet users and the ease of accessibility of the World Wide Web, there is an increasing demand for the use of the Web as a vehicle for distributed applications. These distributed applications are composed of HTML documents and can be accessed by various Web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Hypertext links relate the documents to each other and give users a way to navigate from one file to another.
These distributed applications require security to limit access to valid users. Currently, a typical approach to providing security for HTML documents requires the server directory and subdirectories where the HTML documents are located to be secured at the same level. This means that an individual user can have access to all the documents in the directory or access to none of the documents in the directory based on an appropriate user id and password. Another drawback of this typical approach is that this approach depends upon the naming convention used for the subdirectories and thus makes porting of the application (and all of the associated HTML documents) to another server difficult.
There is a need for a system and method for providing required security levels to particular documents in distributed applications on a document by document basis (or groups of documents or any combination).